A week ago, Richard Perle got up and said:

Defined as a robust approach, I think it is fair to say that not only is the neoconservative moment not over, it is, sorry Josh, just beginning. What is also not over is the left’s obsession with neoconservatism, or what they believe neoconservatism is. An obsession that if you look at Mr. Marshall’s blog you will find preoccupies what I think must be almost every waking moment. [6:30]

The occasion was a debate at the Hudson Institute, a neocon think tank, with as topic “Is the neoconservative moment over?” What follows is two hours of essential and riveting viewing, available free and on demand at the C-Span website and worth checking out in a lull between food-induced stupors this Christmas holiday, because none other than neoconservatism’s prime operative lays out the most honest and articulate apologia I’ve heard for Bush’s post-9/11 policies. Joshua Marshall, the butt of barely concealed disdain by Perle, Mentioning “the execrable Robert Fisk,” Perle turns to Marshall and says “I suspect he’s a pal of yours.” plays the role of pi“ada in a roomful of neocons, but manages to make the obvious broadsides in return. It’s the ideological equivalent of an ambulance hitting a schoolbus, in slow motion, on video, and it left me agape at times.

In the audience sat Michelle Goldberg, of Salon, and she wrote up the event here. Marshall of course covers it in his blog here, here and here. It turns out Josh was on the tail end of a flu-ish bout, hence his inability, perhaps, to muster indignation at jibe after jibe. Or perhaps he just has bloggers’ thick skin. This triangulation of perspectives fills out our view of the event rather nicely, but there is still a bit more to squeeze from it:

First, the C-Span camera crew seems to have a policy that cut-aways from the debate protagonists must include long lingering closeups of all the pretty women in the room. And I must say that there were quite a few in attendance. Are they all neocons? I wonder how much of this neocon machismo is just another tactic to get chicks? To be fair, Marshall himself flirts via his blog with Salon’s GoldbergTo get a good, long, lingering look at Goldberg’s “downtown haircut and style of dress”, fast forward to 1:20:42 on your Real Player.. Is US foreign policy just the result of policy wonks trying to get laid? I thought West Wing was fiction.

Second, I think Perle may have been too honest:

Everything we did after September 11 might well have been done before September 11, with two obvious added benefits. We would have avoided September 11 and we could probably have destroyed much of the Al Qaeda network while it was comfortably ensconced behind the protection of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. But we waited too long. This has led some of us, and I believe it helped lead President Bush to the conclusion that we mustn’t wait too long with respect to Iraq. [10:45]

Which is really a remarkable admission. Is he admitting that the decision to remove Saddam was taken soon after 9/11, subsequent facts be damned? Did missing the intelligence that could have prevented 9/11 really justify being paranoid subsequently with Iraq? Maddeningly, I don’t remember Marshall or anyone else pressing Perle on the practice of stovepiping, the triumph of ideology over accuracy that whipped the White House into a war frenzy and which is now a major source of contention.

Marshall does try to corner Perle on the fact that in the absence of WMDs, if you plan to justify pre-emptively invading Iraq on the lesser charge of Saddam failing to prove a lack of WMDs to your satisfaction, you need to demonstrate a reasonable chance of your policy being successful, because other policy options are available. Is erring on the side of caution really a good idea when the error involves the additional costs of alienating allies, sidelining the UN, trodding all over international law and widespread popular resentment, not to mention US lives and a lot of money?

To Perle, this line of argumentation is scorn-inducing, but to me, it made the game of Spot the Paranoid Ideologue far too easy: Perle cannot conceive that those who disagree with his beliefs are sincere. I, at least, am willing to believe Perle means what he says. If Perle thinks asking whether there could have been more productive ways to spend such scarce resources is tantamount to a self-hating attempt to sabotage the defense of the homeland, then I think Perle forfeited the intellectual debate. And I mean that.

My friend Marc Young in Berlin berated me at the time of the Swedish EMU referendum for contributing to the event being, in his words, “the high water mark” for the European project. Swedes rejecting EMU would deal a blow to the momentum of the EU that would result in the collapse of the cooperative spirit that had been pushing the project forward.

Two events subsequent to the referendum make it look increasingly that Marc was right about the “high water mark,” though it is hardly due to the efforts of the SwedesThe Swedes, in the meantime, are increasingly grateful [Swedish] they did not commit to the euro on Sept 14.. These are:

1. The Stability and Growth Pact, a silly rule-based attempt to shoehorn European economies into responsible spending, failed spectacularly, but it should never have been implemented. The need for a (hopefully sane) replacement system reveals another weakness in the euro project: individual states can undermine confidence in a common currency by spending recklessly — it is not just the European Central Bank’s interest rate that directly affects the economic health of euroland. But when is spending reckless and when is it a necessary kick in the ass of a national economy? National governments will disagree. And how can you argue that euroland economies are synchronized if some are trying to spend their way out of a recession while others have budget surpluses?

At the risk of repeating myself: The euro makes sense for a core of countries whose economies are tied to that of Germany. For the rest of Europeans, the euro is a bad idea, because they are not part of the euro’s optimal currency area. There is nothing ideological to this line of thinking. The current mess is directly attributable to an economic project having been hijacked for political ends.

2. The EU summit this weekend failed, and I am pleased. National leaders will now have to admit they cannot push ahead while merely treating the symptoms of the ills besieging the EU project. To me, there are two fundamental problems with the EU currently, and they interact in a vicious circle:

Where’s the subsidiarity?

The haggling over national voting rights is a symptom of the failure of national governments to cede power to their intended replacements — representative bodies like the EU parliament and regional authorities. Remember the principle of subsidiarity? It was all the rage when I was a fledgling European back in the 80s, but in the past 15 years that powerful idea has been turned into a vague guiding principle the Commission and Council of Ministers need only pay lip service to. The Shroeders, Chiracs and Aznars of Europe are proving incapable of signing themselves into relative irrelevance. It’s trite but true: bureaucracies are institutionally incapable of divesting themselves of power. By now, the Council of Ministers should no longer be a prize worth haggling over. Real power should reside in the European Parliament when it concerns continent-wide matters, and at a regional level when it is a local matter.

Where’s the accountability?

The European Parliament was created as a vessel for representing the will of Europeans, and it is waiting patiently, but instead power remains concentrated in the EU’s less accountable organs. National governments are genuinely reluctant (or pretend to be) to sign away their powers to EU umbrella organizations if these are less democratic than the current setup.

Of course, these same national governments constitute the Council of Ministers, the body that should long ago have ceded its powers to the more democratic EU bodiesShenanigans like creating new commissioners as countries are added to the EU roster is precisely the wrong direction to proceed in. There is no relation whatsoever between the optimal number of departments for conducting European affairs and the number of countries in the EU..

A lack of accountability in the EU diminishes popular support for a movement towards truly Europe-wide government, which in turn diminishes pressure on national governments to prepare accountable replacements for governing. It’s a catch-22.

I hope this voting rights roadblock that scuttled this weekend’s EU summit is insurmountable. Only then will national governments have to look for a solution that actually progresses the cause of the EU as intended by the likes of Jean Monnet“There were two main ideas that dominated Monnet’s vision on how Europe should be built. On the one hand, Europe should be built on concrete achievements rather than on visions and ideas. On the other hand, an enduring European community should be based on common, stable institutions and not just on inter-governmental cooperation.”.

I was also extremely pleased with the failure to agree on the rest of the text for the European Constitution. Every version I’ve seen of that proposed document is hostage to narrow interests and exclusionary thinking. It fails completely to inspire. Even I can do better, so here is my preamble — as it should be, it is vague on he details but crystal clear on the fundamentals:

We the peoples, having fought against one another for millenia on the grounds of race, religion, language and ideology, have learned our lesson. No longer shall our differences outweigh our common humanity. Henceforth, our societies will be open and liberal, respectful of the UN charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in addition embracing the best practices in democracy, market economics, social equity, unfettered trade amongst ourselves and with others, the free movement of labor, and ecology.

Our aim is to build societies that allow all individual lives to be lived to their fullest potential without squandering the resources of future generations. To this end, and recognizing that governing bodies gain legitimacy from below, not above, we are pursuing a system of cooperative governance according to the principle of subsidiarity. Sovereignty on individual matters will reside as locally as practicable.

We believe that this way lies peace and prosperity, and hence we urge all other societies to join us in adopting these guiding principles.

We put that, or something like it, to a Europe-wide vote, and if the answer is no I’ll gladly move to South Africa.

I am fated to defend the US in Europe and to defend Europe in the US. The task is usually one of leaning into prevailing opinion. When large groups of people think alike there tends to be underexposure by idées fixes to counterarguments. This is fertile ground for cultural stereotyping, and a great place to blog.

The Spectator‘s Mark Steyn cannot claim ignorance in defense of his opinions, nor can he plead absence of critical faculties, so you have to conclude he is either malicious, or a pathological troll masquerading as a columnist. In case he is not the latter, I’ve taken the bait — This recent piece by Steyn is not just a crime against nuance, it’s an embarrassment that should be in little need of exposition, though it seems to be getting widespread and uncritical play.

I’d call the following Fisking, but it’s less challenging than that. It’s more like shooting fisk in a barrelThat, by the way, I believe to be my second pun ever involving Swedish..

Once, Steyn could be quite hysterically funny with his clever putdowns of clear idiots, but now he is merely hysterical, foaming at the bit to outdo the National Review’s Denis Boyles labelling Europeans as “cockroaches”. In a literary feat, Steyn declares Europeans “worse than cockroaches.” Evidence of this: Four news items, each of which in turn betrays evidence of a hastily scribbled column.

Just look at them. Item number 1 is about Canada, not Europe. Wrong tree. The kindest we can say about item number 3 is that his reporting is shoddy: The statement “59 per cent of Europeans think Israel is the biggest threat to world peace” is not true. Not caring to fact-check is shoddy, while knowing it’s not true and still using it would be worse. It reminds me of stovepiping, though perhaps that is a word not likely to find its way into Steyn’s vocabulary any time soon.

Item number 4 gets bizarre. We now have the spectacle of Steyn flaunting his cavalier approach to fact checking:

The other day I accidentally referred to Tariq Ali as Tariq Aziz and within minutes had a little flurry of emails from correspondents sneering that evidently all these guys sound alike to me. Well, I wouldn’t say that. But Tariq Ali and Tariq Aziz are sounding very much alike.

Aside from that, what the opinion of one left-wing commentator is meant to infer about the rest of the world is a mystery to me, but it comes effortlessly to Steyn:

For him, and for Mr Collenette [a Canadian], and for Goran Persson and Nelson Mandela and many many others, even on 11 September, the issue was never terrorism; the issue was always America.

Steyn must have done some remarkable research to ensure that the above sentence is not as utterly stupid as it appears.

Which leaves item 2, the nationality of missiles used in attacks against Americans in Iraq.

Much of the death and destruction was caused by French 68mm missiles Îin pristine condition’, according to one US officer who inspected the rocket tubes and assembly. In other words, they’re not rusty leftovers Saddam had lying around from the 1980s.

No, those would have been American. Why they would rust in a desert I don’t know, and the same goes for French arms. I also doubt the US officer inspected the missiles before they blew up. In any case, blaming the French for the attack is like blaming Boeing for 9/11. Who knows how the missiles got there, and how old they are? This is the flimsiest of grounds for outrage, and a dangerous precedent. If American weapons are ever used by the enemy, will Steyn be consistent and denounce America?

The point of all this? “Europe is dying.” The continent is importing too many Muslims, they’re breeding, and they’re radical. Yes, all of them, if Steyn can help it. “Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans, and what’s left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. That’s the Europe that Britain will be binding its fate to.” No Muslims in Britain, of course, thank God, and not enough in America for them to poison the well with their incessant plotting. But everything bad in Europe is due to these Muslims and their tolerators.

I’ve heard that kind of argument before. At least Mr. Steyn is decent enough not to offer a solution.

The entrance to my apartment building in Stockholm has a bulletin board. On it you will find a memo about the drying cabinets in the laundry room, an ad from a locksmith, one from a real estate agent, and then it has a small poster depicting a world painted in the American flag, subtitled En annan världsbild är möjlig, “another conception of the world is possible” &mdash or, “another idea of how the world should be is possible.” It’s been there for at least a month, ever since I moved in.

I don’t disagree with the literal message on this posterNov 3,2003: Clarification: What I mean is, it is trivially true that other conceptions of the world are possible; it is a non-normative statement., which is one reason why I think it fails as a piece of propaganda art. What is clear is that the person who posted it holds assumptions that do not bear closer scrutiny. Something compels me to list them.

1. The world is currently like that: It is not. American ideas hold very little sway in most parts of the world (Sweden being an obvious exception).

2. A world like that is undesirable: It is not. Attaining American levels of corruption, crime, due process of law, freedom of speech and democracy would be a huge improvement in the quality of life of an overwhelming majority of the world’s population (Sweden again being an exception).

3. The American flag symbolizes American imperialism:Leave aside for a minute the absurd idea that the US is a cultural imperialist, forcing its films and fast food on unwilling victims. To indict the American flag — and the entirety of the American project it represents — on the grounds of Bush’s foreign policy is like condemning the Swedish way of life on account of a profitable arms industry, or its neutrality during World War IIWere the poster in question to date from 1944, with not a letter changed, it would have done an admirable job rallying support against Nazism.. It is not unlike condemning all of Islam on account of its more radical strains.

Perhaps I resist the use of the American flag in the context of this poster because I do not think of the US as a nation state, of the same mold as European countries. Bash the French flag, and you bash France. Bash the Italian flag, and you bash Italy. But reproach the American flag and you cannot help but lash out against a whole lot more.

This is because — unlike nation states — America is not founded on a myth of common provenance, but on a myth of common arrival. And while we can never choose our provenance, we should certainly be able to choose our destiny. Many millions of immigrants have done just that, becoming Americans by sheer force of will. Try that in Germany. Or Denmark. America is not so much a country as a state of mind; a subscription to a set of parameters within which an inclusive democratic society would be built.

Spreading this meme — painting the globe with the American flag, if you will — is a worthwhile cause, as far as I am concerned. Of course, I completely disagree with the neo-cons on how to go about it.

Which still leaves me with that poster on my doorstep every morning. The concept of a free-speech zone in every hallway holds great appeal to me; it’s a very American thing, really. It reminded me of this highly entertaining piece by Mike Adams, an American college professor who earlier this year documented his testing of the limits of tolerance of speech at his university. He turned his office door into a free speech zone, and allowed anyone to post anything on it, waiting to see who would be the first to fail the testIt was a feminist student who complained first; she objected to the sticker “So you’re a feminist?… Isn’t that cute”..

In that spirit, I’ve now made my own contribution to the bulletin board. On my way back from New York, I bought a 79c postcard of the Statue of Liberty and that poem by Emma Lazarus“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”. I put it up late last night. Oh, I know, it’s corny, and I feel guilty for stooping to the challenge like that, but I no longer feel like I implicitly agree with the poster’s sentiment every time I walk by it. And whoever put it there no longer assumes that I do.